Project Puts Cw Crafts Onto Computer Screens

WILLIAMSBURG — Imagine being whisked back to the Williamsburg of the 1700s to watch blacksmiths, dress makers and carpenters ply their time-honored trades.

Imagine haggling with a master cabinet maker, contracting the services of a Colonial-era mason or learning to cook a meal with a crude brick oven.

And imagine taking that trip through time via computer, from a classroom anywhere in the country.

Michael Tuite, who lives near Charlottesville, has been working since December to make such a computerized journey into the past possible. Last week, Tuite won a $25,000 grant from Oracle Corp., a California-based software company, to help fund his project.

"I want this to be a revolutionary use of computers in the classroom," Tuite said. "My objective is to bring the world of interactive media and the arts and humanities together. This won't be a game, it would actually be an integral part of a social studies curriculum."

His computer program, called "The Work of Many Hands: How Things Were Made When America Was New," will be geared toward students in the third, fourth and fifth grades. It will use a combination of video images, comPuter animation, music, narration and text to let children explore America's past.

Video footage of historical interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg will be central to the program, which Tuite hopes will be available for schools in the summer or fall of 1996. The program will let children interact with images of artisans, craftsmen and other people from the past to learn how colonists built houses, sewed their own clothes and made a variety of household items. To some degree, Tuite said, it will be like watching a movie in which you tell the characters what to do.

"It's an opportunity for people to feel like they're going to Colonial Williamsburg and traveling back in time," he said. "Students will retain more of what they learn because it's not just text - it's a number of different media."

Roy Underhill, who has been working with computer and video productions at Colonial Williamsburg for more than 10 years, is helping Tuite with the project.

Underhill, who also produces and hosts "The Woodwright's Shop" for PBS, said Tuite's program will share an important characteristic with Colonial Williamsburg itself: It will encourage people to learn about the past at their own pace and in whatever order suits them.

"It's an environment in which you explore," Underhill said. "You make choices and follow your own path of interest. Curiosity is rewarded at every turn."

The program will be extremely flexible, Tuite added, and will let students diverge from the topics they set out to study to learn more about history, science, music, art and other subjects.

"For example, if someone is studying about blacksmithing, he could pursue questions about iron mining or how metals conduct heat," he said. "There's a lot of content aside from the straightforward lesson."

A prototype of the program should be finished in May, Tuite said. He added that Oracle may give him another $100,000 to continue the project if the prototype meets expectations.